Page 465 - A Little Life: A Novel

Now it is mid-September, and Willem is preparing to leave again. As has
become their ritual—ever since the Last Supper, a lifetime ago—they spend
the Saturday before Willem’s departure having dinner somewhere

extravagant and then the rest of the night talking. Sunday they sleep late
into the morning, and Sunday afternoon, they review practicalities: things to
be done while Willem is away, outstanding matters to be resolved, decisions
to be made. Ever since their relationship has changed from what it had been
into what it now is, their conversations have become both more intimate
and more mundane, and that final weekend is always a perfect, condensed
reflection of that: Saturday is for fears and secrets and confessions and

remembrances; Sunday is for logistics, the daily mapmaking that keeps
their life together inching along.
He likes both types of conversations with Willem, but he appreciates the
mundane ones more than he’d imagined he would. He had always felt
bound to Willem by the big things—love; trust—but he likes being bound
to him by the small things as well: bills and taxes and dental checkups. He

is always reminded of a visit to Harold and Julia’s he’d made years ago,
when he had come down with a terrible cold and had wound up spending
most of the weekend on the living-room sofa, wrapped in a blanket and
sliding in and out of sleep. That Saturday evening, they had watched a
movie together, and at one point, Harold and Julia had begun talking about
the Truro house’s kitchen renovation. He half dozed, listening to their quiet
talk, which had been so dull that he couldn’t follow any of the details but

had also filled him with a great sense of peace: it had seemed to him the
ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you
could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.
“So I left a message with the tree guy and told him you’re going to call
this week, right?” Willem asks. They are in the bedroom, doing the last of
Willem’s packing.

“Right,” he says. “I wrote myself a note to call him tomorrow.”
“And I told Mal you’d go up with him to the site next weekend, you
know.”
“I know,” he says. “I have it in my schedule.”
Willem has been dropping stacks of clothes into his bag as he talks, but
now he stops and looks at him. “I feel bad,” he says. “I’m leaving you with
so much stuff.”